In this Macromedia Flash tutorial you will learn the basics of shape tweening, in just a few easy steps

This is a very basic feature in Macromedia Flash, you should not need to have any experience before this tutorial, but some basic knowlage of the userinterface would be good.

And as the headline says you are going to learn to shape tween, number shapes.

1.
Start by opening a new project, then about center of the stage, with your text tool from the tools panel, click and type in the number 1.

2.
Now we need some guide lines so the next number we are going to make is being placed precisley at the same place as the first, but just in another frame.
So go to the menu called view and click rulers, then you will get some measuering numbers at the left and top, drag out the rulers from those bars, so they center the letter as in the image below.

3.
Now in the timeline, which should be placed at the top, you will see one black dot, this is because you have 1 frame with content (your number), right click at frame 10 and choose create blank key frame, within this frame use your text tool again and type in the number 2, the guide lines from before should help you place it ontop of the other number.

Now by clicking the two black dots you can toggle between number 1 and 2.

4.
In the timeline right click in between the two frames you created and choose Create Motion Tween.
Then in the properties panel as standart its placed at the bottom, click and change the motion tween to a shape tween as shown in the image below.

You will see a dotted line between the two frames, this means that the shape tween you are trying to accomplish wont work because the shapes you have are not raw shapes, but vector text shapes.

5.
We have to change the shapes to raw shapes.
So click the first frame to shown the number 1, then right click on the number and choose break apart, do this twice and you will see the shape will have a lot of white dots, (this just means that your shape is now raw). click frame 10 and repeat this for the other shape.

6.
Then you should see a clean line in the timeline between the two frames as shown below.

7.
Now your tween is actulley done, you can right click at frame 20 and 30 and then make some more shapes and do some more tweening, as I did.